urls	https://gemini.google.com/app/37bd5b95ab983a95 https://gemini.google.com/app/cfef3eb756d8ccc6 https://gemini.google.com/app/34a93568b8cf6672 https://chatgpt.com/c/68e406d5-a274-8330-baae-5cd5e5bd795e https://chatgpt.com/c/6a9d3d05-2d1c-83eb-af3a-16bb0c644d0f https://chatgpt.com/c/6a9d3d05-2d1c-83eb-af3a-16bb0c644d0f

Field-Notes

Practical notes and solutions from the tech trenches.

This repository is a living collection of technical notes, scripts, and solutions to non-obvious real-world problems - kept as a reference for myself and shared in case others find it useful.

Each topic has its own folder containing a README.md and any supporting files. The table of contents also links to related standalone repositories - effectively "promoted" notes.

Contents

Windows Systems and Storage

• New PC setup
  • Part 1: Structuring workstation storage for maintenance, migration, and failure recovery
  • Part 2: Building a dual-purpose multiboot USB drive
• Setting up WSL 2 for AI development with controlled storage

Downloads and Git

• Resuming downloads from dynamic or expiring links with wget or aria2
• Downloading and caching the latest GitHub release assets on Windows
• Proof of concept: resumable Git clone through sparse checkout

Python and Native-Code Development

• Bootstrapping reproducible Python environments on Windows with Micromamba
• Working around pip failure to detect MSVC Build Tools
• Building and installing FFCV on Windows
• Testing C APIs directly with Pytest and CFFI

SQLite

SQL and Data Modelling

• Practical advanced SQL and SQLite notes
• Exploring Zotero’s SQLite data model through direct database access
• Reverse engineering SQLite schemas with ERD Concepts
• SQLiteMP: materialized-path hierarchies in SQLite

Builds and Extensions

• Building SQLite and SQLiteODBC with ICU and additional extensions on Windows
• Integrating loadable extensions into the SQLite amalgamation as auto-extensions
• SQLiteExtensionTemplate: C extension development and testing
• SQLitePackedBlob: compact storage for numeric arrays and embeddings
• SQLiteRegexpMatches: JSON arrays of regular-expression matches

VBA Database Access and OOP Design

• SecureADODB fork: exploring OOP-centric designs for database access
• SQLiteC for VBA: designing OOP interfaces for SQLite access via ADODB and directly through the C API

Patents

• Parsing and relationally modelling the IPC scheme XML

AI-Assisted Development

• Exploratory prompting with ChatGPT
• Greenfield development: from problem or idea to MVP

Acknowledgments

The solutions and documentation in this repository were developed with active AI assistance (mainly, Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT) for brainstorming, code generation, and the refinement of code and text.